Oracle unveils Blockchain Cloud Service

Today Oracle unveiled its Blockchain Cloud Service to help organizations to build blockchain networks. Though they framed this as the ‘early adopter version’.

In a statement, Oracle said that “blockchain has the power to fundamentally transform how every industry does business by making interactions more secure, transparent, efficient and cost-effective.”

The primary aim of the service is to enable clients to focus on building applications rather than looking after the painful process of managing blockchain servers. So they’re providing two main sets of services.

One is plug and play integrations. So this includes blockchain adapters to connect to both Oracle and third-party systems for data input. In addition, there’s integration with LDAP and active directory.

Secondly is the server management. This enables companies to deploy smart contracts through a network in a more conventional enterprise manner. That involves version control, testing, automated backups, and the ability to deploy across the whole network. Plus there’s recovery in the case of failure. Oracle provides a 99.5 percent availability SLA.

Blockchain protocol layer

The blockchain layer is currently only Hyperledger Fabric. Ledger Insights recently spoke to Oracle team members, and it’s likely R3’s Corda will be added in the future though it could take some time. Corda is already integrated with Oracle’s Netsuite ERP product.

Centralization?

A natural question is if all nodes are on Oracle’s cloud, then how do they achieve decentralization? The answer is that the nodes don’t all have to be on Oracle’s cloud, they could be on Azure, Amazon AWS or elsewhere.

New applications

Oracle is planning new SaaS applications that will include track and trace, provenance identification, warranty and usage, and cold chain.

Client announcements

The biggest names announced amongst a longer list were Arab Joran Investment Bank, CargoSmart, and Intelipost. That said, doubtless there are others who aren’t yet ready to talk about their activities.

Steve Siu, CEO of CargoSmart commented: “Its comprehensive nature has allowed us to quickly turn prototypes into viable products in several 12-week sprints and so far, we have seen proven productivity gains of more than 30 percent compared to other blockchain platforms we tested.

Oracle’s unveiling comes just a month after SAP unveiled its cloud offering. IBM and Microsoft launched their services some time ago.